Rebecca Goldberg Oliver lives in Richmond, Virginia, and is a painter, a mother of two, and a cheerleader. The paintings she does in oils. The cheers she does—of course!—in a short skirt. But on Oliver’s "team" jocks are scarce. She cheers for the art world, and her squad’s foot-stomping chants ring with satirical wit and sharp political views on the role of artists in contemporary society. Call it performance art with pompoms.

Oliver's current crew, the Art Cheerleaders™, is made up mostly of Richmond artists and gallery owners and will start performing this fall. It is a resurrection of the Art School Cheerleaders™, an impromptu squad that Oliver, a former high school cheerleader in Maryland, helped start at the Museum School in 1996. With their combat boots, fishnet stockings, and cheers such as “What can you be with an art degree?”, the student cheerleaders quickly "snowballed," according to Oliver. They performed at Boston art galleries and political events, and opened for bands. " We fit in everywhere," Oliver says. "We were funny, and people connect with funny. But then we’d slip in something meaningful about Jesse Helms and art censorship."

Now Oliver's relatively carefree student days are long gone. Her portrait and landscape commissions, not to mention caring for her young sons, leave little time for her own artistic " visions" of luscious, intimate still lifes and dynamic urban landscapes. So she is writing cheers that explore what it's like to be a practicing adult artist and balance creativity with family responsibilities and work that pays the bills. "Why don’t you get a real job?", for example, "makes light of the tension between the crucial roles artists fill for society and the low value society places on the choice of art as a career path," Oliver says.

Despite the Art Cheerleaders'™ updated perspective, their purpose remains the same. "We’re trying to create an all-American rallying cry for a group that’s traditionally not very cohesive," Oliver says. "I think every city should have art cheerleaders."

To read some of the cheers, click here. For more information on Oliver, visit www.oliverfinearts.com.